When manufacturing a production object by a manufacturing apparatus based on information designed by a designer, the designer and manufacturers need information on properties of components constituting the production object (e.g., parts and materials contained in the object to be produced). For example, when manufacturing a semiconductor device, a designer would not be able to carry out the design thereof if the designer did not know electrical properties of the components, and a manufacturer would not be able to normally operate the manufacturing apparatus if the manufacturer did not know the information of the components, such as a shape, size, and stress.
In such a case as described above, since those properties of the product are indicated usually in brochures and the like made open to the public by parts makers, designing information and manufacturing data for operating the manufacturing apparatus are generated by referring to the properties. Generally, however, the property information disclosed in the brochures and the like is indicated with theoretical values calculated by the parts makers, and those are different from effective values of the components actually being on sale. In other words, even though the parts makers open to the public of the theoretical values, they do not open to the public of property information with effective values of the components actually being on sale.
Designers and manufacturers will be able to manufacture the production object more efficiently if they can refer to the property information of the components actually being on sale. Therefore, implementation of a system capable of easily acquiring the non-public property information of the actual components is expected. However, such a system has not yet been established under the present circumstances. One of the reasons may be that the parts makers are concerned about unnecessary leakage of their original component information respectively unique to the makers. Thus, in order to achieve such a system as described above, it is a required task to provide security on the non-public property information of the components so as to prevent the information from being unnecessarily leaked.
As for the problem described above, a technique, although the technique is not for designing and manufacturing, is disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. HEI 8-44553 (Patent Document 1) in which a plurality of users are allowed to use software having an area opened to the public and an area not opened to the public. The technique disclosed in Patent Document 1 is a system letting the software to be used by a plurality of users, where the public area is permitted to be used for production and reproduction by the users, while the non-public area is permitted to be used only by certain users who have regularly purchased the software; and the system is configured of a plurality of software executing units having a software supplying unit for encrypting the non-public area in the software with an encryption key based on authentication information, an arithmetic processing unit, a memory, a memory controlling unit for controlling access to the memory, an authentication information storage unit for storing the authentication information unique to individual user, a display unit, and an input means; and then the memory controlling unit in the software executing units is provided with an encryption detection circuit for detecting the non-public area and the public area in the software, and a data decryption circuit for generating a decryption key by inputting the authentication information from the authentication information storage unit so as to decrypt the non-public area in the software detected by the encryption detection